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Welcome to my National Poetry Writing Month site! I'll be writing and posting a poem every day during the month of April. This year's project: poems titled after episodes of the original run of The Twilight Zone! For more poems and more information on National Poetry Writing Month, check out NaPoWriMo.net.

The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank
But why should this man who has recently risen from the dead resolve himself into something we can comprehend? It is the 1920s in rural America and a man has died: this we can understand. But at the funeral, when the lanky arms begin to raise, followed almost awkwardly by a body fumbling its way out of the casket, we should certainly know better than to expect that this revivified man can now be anything like simple. In the story we are given clues: an altered personality, an odd work ethic, the air of the supernatural hanging, unsurprisingly, around this miracle man, and we can reasonably draw the conclusion that what we see is not what existed before, or what we could have ever expected to exist. And so we are left to seek out a motive, or a set of goals: what does this new man want? And when we return somewhat empty from this quest, what right do we have to be surprised when the story ends ragged and uninterpreted? Here the Other presents itself as…

and surely the phrase came first,idly flipped until the what ifit was more than figurative enteredthe writer’s mind, and so we seethis timid office worker who buysa newspaper and accidentallypays with a coin that landson its edge, and this miracleof probability grants him (somehow)the ability to read minds. Mostinsanely of all, the lesson learnedhere is not one of human evil,at least not entirely, but ratherthe way we don’t do what we think,the unreliability of mind as narrator.And so, when these magical powersare mysteriously revoked, we findan uncommonly lucky, happy manat the end of the story, he and wethe wiser for our small investment.

A Most Unusual Camera
There can be no more compelling evidencethat the future is determined. You findthe correct angle and press the shutter buttonand in the Polaroid you see what will existthere soon, and this information is morethan just possible, it is certain, beyondany questioning, beyond even the thoughtthat this future could be made anew.But while of course the selfish peoplein the story reap the consequencesof their selfishness, their small crimes,you have to wonder what could have beenif they had refused what the newly developedimage showed for them, or simply adjustedthe angle, tried again from another direction.If photography is enclosure, a curated viewof the world that can in turn show us worldswe could never see otherwise, could it bepossible for future as subject to be likewiseslanted, conditional, open to reframing?

An airliner has landed
with no one on board,
and you are absolutely
certain this is impossible.
You are absolutely certain
of a few things: yourself
and your ability to uncloud
the mysterious, as you
have always done, perfectly.
Most of all, you come
to believe unshakably
that this plane is not real.
You hold this theory
with so much certainty
that without fear you place
your arm into the path
of the propeller, believing
the plane will vanish, and you
can be the hero yet again,
you can unveil the falsehood
of this collective delusion.
And you are right: your obscene
display of will is a success.
But the delusion is not
collective: you find yourself
in the solipsistic feedback loop
of an obsession your pure,
logical mind will only ever
continually repeat: certainty
you could not find years ago,
a mystery you could never solve,
the ghosts of a vanished plane
you could not make reappear.

Case study on human nature: menhurl themselves into the sky,crash on an unknown desertin space, and immediately beginto lie and steal and kill, becausethere is only so much water, somany days to not succumbto a parched-throat death,and above all else our ownlife is what really matters to us.And of course the contaminationof this ostensibly hermeticexperiment becomes apparentin the final grotesque punchline,a diagram written in the sandby a dying man: telephone polesand Reno just over the next dune,an unsuccessful launch into spaceand the comparatively tiny thrustit takes to be our monstrous selves.

Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room
But of course the point is that
the nervous one disappears, yes?
That life affords us more or less
dramatic opportunities to become
alternate versions of ourselves,
to cross some threshold and leave
ourselves behind? We stare
into mirrors each morning and ask
who we will be, and seek out
in the glass something other
than what we know we are.
And who knows how frequently
each of us has banished our own
former selves into this reflective
limbo, how many skins we have
shed only to emerge as somethingother?

What could be more terrifyingthan a man gifted unbeknownstwith a knack for resurrection?He came to the little 19th-centuryArizona town claiming he couldgive them back the ones they loved,and they believed him, and hetook their money and showed themtheir hopes, so convincinglythat they realized the dangerof uncovering buried grievances,breathing new life to vendettasand hatreds. So for another pricehe undid his fictive handiwork,and left the town flush, victorious.And this would be the endingof any normal story, another griftin an endless span of performances.But Jared Garrity could not haveknown that his threadbare magicwould have its claimed effect,that the graves would open wide,the town’s dead rising anewat his call. The poor man could nothave told anyone what it meantto be a con artist so masterfulthat natural law itself is fooled.

When you find yourself in situations like these, you tell yourself stories: you make up a town, and you fill it with all these trappings of regular, everyday life, and in your mind you wander through it because it represents all the things you need. You start to feel like there are other people everywhere, always just out of sight, and in this story town you’re building for yourself, you uncover evidence supporting this bizarrely desperate form of paranoia. You hear rustling around corners, machines whirring along as if left alone only for a moment. You see smoke tendrils still rising from abandoned cigarettes. And this evidence builds and builds, and your desperation builds along with it, because you want to feel like you are getting closer and closer to these mystery people you’ve built for yourself, and at the same time you know, in part of your mind that is very quickly receding under a growing wave of fear and irrationality, that you need this charade to conti…

Ninety Years Without Slumbering
The man turned breaths mechanical,
counted grandfather clock hours
as others might count heartbeats.
He said that his years and days
would end when the warm ticks
inside the oak body quieted, when
the pendulum’s oscillations finally
slowed to nothing, hung silent
behind finely polished glass,
but with his clock’s inevitable
failure he learned the limits
of superstitions, the way our minds
make their own bright illusions
before our eyes when we so desire.
We think we can explain the world
to ourselves, but worlds slip
from our grasp like lost time—
there is no certainty in the gears
we house in wooden boxes,
the supposed assurance rung
out of every mellifluous chime.

and it’s no surprisethey’re us: we all know nowhow very capable we areof producing devastation.What more is thereto say? We rev the enginesof our automobiles as ifthe chorus of ignitionscan drown the dark soundsthat pour from our windowsand alleyways. We brewfine coffee and craft beerand we are so very cleverand for what? This greatgame of exploitationand ignorance and death?If the aliens really arescheming, what needcould they have to tapinto our easy paranoia?Just wait a few more years.

~

What You Need

The old bent man hoistshis box of trinkets: inside,just the thing you need.

Time Enough at Last
—as if to say that it could ever be
enough, the hours and days
that heap up like brazen sins,
each moment an ode to desire,
a mind and body in such love
with each other that they would
crush the world between them,
break apart every atom.

And for what? A few years
of pages, a mound of books
pored over and worn down,
a glutton’s willing sacrifice
of flesh. You, Henry Bemis,
of the thick-frame glasses,
what fate did you expect
your empty world to leave to you?

Dan Gualtieri has an MFA from Bowling Green State University. He is a native of Columbus but has spent many years braving the cruel winds of Ohio's northern and southern flatlands. He is passionate about philosophy, coffee, and the Midwest, and is currently working on a collection of poetry which embodies a struggle with faith, certainty, and a fear of desire.